George Mason University - BA in Film and Video Studies

The Office of the Provost has announced that award-winning documentary filmmaker Carma Hinton will join George Mason University in fall 2006 as a Clarence J. Robinson Professor.

Born in Beijing where she lived until she was 21, Hinton has directed more than 13 documentary films about China, including "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" and "Morning Sun."

A scholar as well as a filmmaker, she has a PhD in art history from Harvard University and has held teaching positions at Swarthmore College, Wellesley College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition, she has lectured widely on Chinese culture, history and film at educational institutions in the United States and around the world.

Her films have been shown in numerous film festivals worldwide and at the Film Forum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., among others, and broadcast on television stations around the world, including PBS, the BBC and ARTE.

Awards she has received include two George Foster Peabody Awards, the American Historical Association's John E. O'Connor Film Award, the International Critics Prize and the Best Social and Political Documentary at the Banff Television Festival, as well as nominations for Best Documentary Feature by the National Film Board of Canada, the ABCNEWS VideoSource and Pare Lorentz Awards by the International Documentary Association, and a National News and Documentary Emmy Award.

Since 1984, a large bequest from the late Clarence J. Robinson has allowed George Mason to appoint to the faculty distinguished professors in the liberal arts and sciences. Clarence J. Robinson Professors are outstanding scholars who are dedicated to undergraduate teaching and whose teaching and scholarship concern broad and fundamental intellectual issues.

Hinton will have a joint appointment with the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.